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Me again I’m afraid. If you’ve got any spare opinions or anecdotes can you forward them to the rest of the diskant staff?

Well, I dragged myself out last night to see Les Savy Fav, The Mars Volta and The Apes despite being exhausted beyond belief. So actually I missed The Apes. I heard they sucked. My impeccable timing had me arriving just as The Mars Volta started their set and I prepared to give them an open mind since I had some respect for At The Drive-In without really being very interested in them. Turns out they ruled, I was well impressed. There was still some elements of At The Drive-In: the sharpness, the fluidity, the action, but there was also a much more relaxed mood with the heavy keyboards and drawn out grooves. I guess it’s very similar to the change between the Nation of Ulysses and the Make-Up, right down to the addition of a supercute girl bassist. Except that I’ve never been too keen on the Make-Up. I can’t forgive them for not being the Nation of Ulysses any more and I imagine there’ll be some ATD-I fans feeling the same way about The Mars Volta. I’ll be intrigued to hear some of their recorded material to see if it’s as good.

The highlight of their set though was when when a bearded guy rushed through the audience and started whooping and dancing with the enthusiasm of a child in a balloon shop. Cue half the audience looking bewildered and wondering who the crazy man was. Tim from Les Savy Fav of course. LSF are just infectiously great, a spectacle of hilarity. They demand your involvement but with such charm that you participate without question. People will dance, people will hug the crazy man, people will allow him to wear their coat, rummage in their handbag and spray breath freshener in your mouth. If you are the security man you will attempt to keep things safe and correct but eventually melt a little and let the fun continue. Les Savy Fav laugh in the face of sense and order and have a bunch of tunes to make anyone dance. They just rock the house well past the curfew and leave you still dancing the next day. You have to see them.

Posted: 03|27|02 at 5:14 pm.
Filed under: live reviews.
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Marceline Smith

Marceline is the fierce, terrifying force behind diskant.net, laughing with disdain as she fires sharpened blades of sarcasm in all directions. Based in Scotland, her lexicon consists of words such as 'jings', 'aboot' and 'aye': our trained voice analysts are yet to decipher some of the relentless stream of genius uttered on a twenty-four hour basis. Marceline's hobbies include working too much and going out in bad weather.